During the month of April 2004 a man called Stefan and I were patients in Room 342, Surgery Unit, Hotel Dieu Hospital, St. Catharines, Ont. Just the two of us. He had a great need to talk about his war experiences. Several times, I told him: Stefan, stop, no more, I can't take it, I need rest. He eventually stopped and I closed the curtain between us. On the wall opposite our beds hung a crucifix. Every morning devotional readings came through the P.A. system. "Our Father, Who art art in heaven, Hallowed be Your Name." Was Stefan folding his hands and listening, too?

Stefan ( not his real name), an eighty-two year old, grizzled fruit farmer from Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., was born close to Krakow, Poland. He suffered from prostate cancer. Access to his bladder was obstructed by a tumor, so his urologist, Dr. Ron Casselman (who also operated on me), inserted a tube right through his lower abdomen. Dr. Casselman told me that Stefan, a long-time patient of his, was as tough as nails. He once ripped out his catheter and went back to work.

On April 2, 2004, I underwent a rather routine procedure called a "TURP" (trans-urethral resection of the prostate). Dr. Casselman had declared me free of cancer following a cystoscopy. However, I had difficulty voiding because of an enlarged prostate. I had a condition called Benign Prostatic Hypertrophy (BPH).

The procedure Dr. Casselman performed was designed to bring relief. As a result of being "turped" I started bleeding rather heavily, which is normal. Through a catheter I was being irrigated continuously around the clock. This lasted nearly five days, requiring me to stay in the hospital. However, during the first evening I blocked up due to built-up coagulated blood. The flushing stopped. A male nurse, John, tried in vain to manually irrigate me. He left me in considerable agony hanging on for dear life onto the monkey bars around my bed. He said he needed to call the doctor.

Apparently, the urologist on call (Dr. Lee) advised John to try something else. Sonja, another nurse, told John to first drip morphine into me from the pole. Almost immediately I began to relax and John went to work on me again. Amazingly, with a syringe he pulled out a whole batch of dark blood clots. He re-inserted the catheter, and the irrigation resumed. What a relief! A similar block occurred the next day, but, this time, the nurses immediately did a "manual" and it worked. During the next days, I managed to walk up and down the hall with my pole, from which hung bags of saline solutions, intravenous drip sacks, antibiotics medication bags, etc. I dragged with me the plastic sack being filled continuously with the reddish liquid flushing out of my bladder. Whenever I passed the nurses' station, I saw a sign with my name on it with the ominous words "patient needs monkey bars."

Little did I know that for the next three days I would share a semi-private hospital room with an Auschwitz - Birkenau extermination camp survivor....

Living in occupied Holland

I was still only five years old when, for us, WW II began in May 1940. We lived in occupied Holland for the next five years. Our neighbor, Mr. Smeisl, was conscripted into the German Army. Apparently, he perished on the Russian front. We never saw him again. Across the street lived a Mr. Nooy, who was a member of the hated N.S.B. party (the "Nationale Socialistische Beweging" - which advocated the Nazi religion in Holland). As a young fellow, I did not know that Mr. Nooy was "impure." His presence on our street must have scared the people many a time. After the war, he met his day in court. I still remember people raiding his house and making a bonfire of his books and Nazi paraphernalia right on Acacialaan, the street where we lived.

Unlike many Dutch people living in the Amsterdam-Utrecht-Rotterdam triangle, we came through the war years relatively unscathed. During April, 1945, members of the Second Canadian Infantery Division approached my hometown, Winschoten, from the direction of Heiligerlee. I still recall seeing them arrive on the "Rijksstraatweg" (highway) along the canal. The Germans had scattered , but our liberators took no chances. The first soldiers we saw were from the Polish Combat Group OW2, advance units of the Canadian First Army. Heavily armed they crept along the canal, never smiling, always cautious, not trusting a soul. You had a sense these guys had a fanatic hatred for the Germans. They remembered only too well the atrocities the Einsatzgruppen (the dreaded Nazi clean up troups) had committed on their families and countrymen back home....

"Blitzkrieg" in Poland

When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, Stefan was 17 years old. He grew up around the area of Krakow. His brother had a friend, Karol Wojtyla, who later became the now-deceased Pope John Paul II. Stefan had nothing good to say about Karol Wojtyla, who at that time was 19 years old.

He didn't go into details. But he was loath to admit that the citizens of Poland, especially members of the Roman Catholic Church, later revered this great man for his outstanding spiritual leadership and contribution to not only a drastic overhaul of Polish politics but especially to the resulting fall of communism.

Stefan was conscripted into the Polish Army, an army which was literally obliterated during the hideous "Blitzkrieg," a war fought with dive-bombing Stukas and unrelenting Panzer attacks. He was caught, became a prisoner of war and was sent to a concentration camp in southern Germany.

He told me how he escaped from this camp and started to walk towards neutral Switzerland. He almost made it had it not been for some overly- zealous, law-abiding border guards. Once again in German hands, they sent him to back to southern Poland. Destination: the notorious SS-run death camp (Vernichtungslager) called Auschwitz-Birkenau. He was registered , tattooed (#80232) on his left arm, and began four years of hard labor and suffering.

Aerial view of Auschwitz- Birkenau taken by a U.S. Airforce pilot on August 25, 1944.

Surviving the holocaust

How he survived is a story in itself. Apparently, he stayed alive because of his cunning and his skills as a stonemason. Stefan often went on at length about the horrors he witnessed: the interminable roll-calls, the senseless beatings of people too weak to stand up, the hunger and deprivation, the never-ending arrivals of trains bringing more and more Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, political prisoners, the cruel separation of families, the gas chambers and the smoke-belching crematoria.

Somehow he stayed alive. For a while I shuddered. What if he had been a "kapo" (a prisoner trained by the SS to maintain order in the barracks)? I had read much about these monsters who did the dirty work for the SS - often ending up themselves in the gas chambers. Listening to Stefan, though, I concluded he had not been one of them.

Image of the Auschwitz Camp gate bearing the words "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work makes one free)

The Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp comprised 15 square miles of territory, surrounded by high, barbed, electrified fences. An estimated two million people from German-occupied countries were killed there in less than three years. More and more gas chambers and crematoria had been built to attain this result.

What kept Stefan alive was his apparent usefulness to the SS. He was a skilled stonecutter and bricklayer. Early in 2005 I saw a series of moving TV documentaries on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the liberation (by the Russians) of Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. I noticed that a lot of the buildings were constructed of bricks and cement blocks. It hit me: were those the buildings Stefan helped to construct and maintain?

Death marches

Stefan recalled how the American planes came over to bomb the I.G. Farben Chemical plants nearby. As one Auschwitz survivor said on the TV program: we prayed that they would bomb us and wipe this horrible place from the face of the earth. It did not happen. But, Stefan said, some stray bombs did fall on the camps. With the SS guards hiding in the bunkers, Stefan saw many inmates, standing unprotected in the open for roll-call, being blown to bits.

One day I asked Stefan how he knew so much about world affairs, politics and philosophy. He surprised me by stating that he often had an opportunity to join inmates who were listening to doctors, pastors, professors and other intellectuals who would meet in secret to debate many issues, including what the world would or should be like after the war. He'd learned a great deal.

It is well-known that the Russians liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau. Day after day the guns were getting louder and the SS guards becoming more and more nervous. They ordered the healthiest and strongest inmates to start marching away from southern Poland, back into Germany. And so began the death marches from the many concentration camps, away from the areas about to be overrun by the Russians.

Stefan went on one of these death marches towards the West. He recalled how each day more and more inmates dropped dead from exhaustion, hunger and deprivation. Stefan walked on and on. Exhausted he arrived at another notorious camp called Bergen-Belsen ( This is the camp where Anne Frank died just before the Americans liberated that place in early 1945.) The conditions in that camp at that time were beyond description. Inmates were lying exposed in their filth all over the field and in typhus-infested barracks. No one was being fed. It was a camp of death....

At first, the Americans by-passed Bergen-Belsen, which is fairly close to the Dutch border. In fact, it's not that far from where I grew up in northern Groningen. Why, the Americans at first ignored this horrible camp I don't know. But they did come back and saw for themselves. And they told the world. They started to feed the inmates who were still alive. Many did not heed the warnings from the medics to not overeat. Stefan said that many gorged themselves with food , became sick and died.

Somehow, Stefan made it out of Bergen- Belsen, eventually making it to Canada. He first settled around Ottawa, later moving to the Niagara area. He worked on the Hydro Project close to Chippawa and Niagara Falls. He married a Polish woman, bought a little farm and started growing grapes in the Niagara area. They started a family.

Several times, during Stefan's stay in the hospital, I met his son, a big, powerful fellow in his late thirties. I noticed how he, in a somewhat wry manner, listened to his Dad tell all these stories about his war experiences. Obviously, he had heard it all before....